This morning one of our customer contact me due to an error message on his website. Instead of displaying blog content, his website display an error message : “Bandwidth limit exceeded ” . This message usually appears when the website bandwidth exceeds predetermined limit . Bandwidth usage is calculated from the total of incoming and outgoing data (upload and download) of the hosting account .
The easiest way to resolve the problem is simply increase the bandwidth limit and maybe charge for additional bandwidth :_) , but I am curious how many bandwidth was consumed for a standard website with usual traffic, so I checked the bandwidth usage before trying to upgrade the bandwidth limit.
After checking bandwidth usage, I found unexpected results. His website consumed more than 50 GB bandwidth. This is quite large, because his website not really popular and daily traffic is about 300-700 visitors. After check some possibility of an error setting , I found the source problem : bandwidth usage came from backup traffic while transferring his website into another server/location.
According the above check, it’s seems much easier to reset the bandwidth usage rather than increase his bandwidth limit. The following step are the procedure to reset bandwidth usage in WHM (Web Hosting Management) :
- SSH/Putty to a WHM server
- Go to the folder /var/cpanel/bandwidth.cache/
- Edit the corresponding file name, according to the name of hosting account
- Change the number of bandwidth to the desired number . For example, I change the number with 0, it means that the bandwidth usage is reset to zero
- Save the edited file. Check bandwidth usage on WHM | Show Bandwidth Usage, it should display the correct bandwidth usage according to the results of the previous step
Increasing bandwidth usage usually correlated with the level of traffic and the popularity of website, but it can also caused by too many file download and upload.
